A Rhetoric of Irony

by Wayne C. Booth

Perhaps no other critical label has been made to cover more ground than "irony," and in our time irony has come to have so many meanings that by itself it means almost nothing. In this work, Wayne C. Booth cuts through the resulting confusions by analyzing how we manage to share quite specific ironies—and why we often fail when we try to do so. How does a reader or listener recognize the kind of statement which requires him to reject its "clear" and "obvious" meaning? And how does any reader know where to stop, once he has embarked on the hazardous and exhilarating path of rejecting "what the words say" and reconstructing "what the author means"?

In the first and longer part of his work, Booth deals with the workings of what he calls "stable irony," irony with a clear rhetorical intent. He then turns to intended instabilities—ironies that resist interpretation and finally lead to the "infinite absolute negativities" that have obsessed criticism since the Romantic period.

Professor Booth is always ironically aware that no one can fathom the unfathomable. But by looking closely at unstable ironists like Samuel Becket, he shows that at least some of our commonplaces about meaninglessness require revision. Finally, he explores—with the help of Plato—the wry paradoxes that threaten any uncompromising assertion that all assertion can be undermined by the spirit of irony.

Genres: Literary Criticism, Writing, Nonfiction, Criticism, Lit Crit, Humor, Philosophy

310 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1974

Reviews

[Bill FromPA · Rating 4 out of 5]

Over the past 4 years, I’ve probably been a bit unfair to The Rhetoric of Fiction by Wayne C. Booth. I know from re-visiting it from time to time that it’s a solid guide to understanding voice in fiction. My problem was that I went to the book looking for a way of understanding and explicating irony in fiction, and found Booth’s treatment of it there to be mostly unsatisfactory.

I did not know at the time that Booth later wrote an entire book devoted to irony, which I’ve now read and I am (ironically?) still pretty unsatisfied, though I can hardly maintain that the author’s treatment of the subject was inadequate or superficial. I guess I’m looking for something that can’t exist: a key to analytically explicating irony from a purely textual analysis. But as Booth shows, understanding irony relies largely on extra-textual factors: the attitudes and worldview of author and reader, the historical situation of a text, and the context in which a text is written and read.

I might summarize Booth’s take on irony as, “well, it all depends…” and “I know it when I read it (and you know it when you read it, though you may know it in a far greater or lesser number of instances than I do)”. The appreciation of irony requires a kind of dance of mutual recognition between author and reader: a mutual recognition of coded meaning that, because it potentially excludes some, if not many, readers, is perhaps the closest two minds can come to each other through the written word.

For most of his text, Booth deals with “stable irony”: ironically worded passages which the reader mentally reconstructs into the “true” meaning of the passage. He looks at a variety of ways in which this is handled by writers and understood by readers, in both extended excerpts and several complete works: A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift, “All That Rises Must Converge” by Flannery O’Connor, and a number of poems. This sort of play-by-play analysis of reading irony makes explicit a process that is subconscious for most experienced readers and is helpful in illustrating Booth's more general points.

Equally vital to the reading of the ironic passages in his examples of stable irony is the highlighting of the parts of the work which, for a proper understanding, need to be read un-ironically. (As indicated in many qualifications Booth gives in his analyses, such as recognizing the potential controversy raised by the idea of “proper” or “correct” reading, the author always feels himself on shaky ground in making categorical statements and goes to some lengths to define the limits and assumptions of his inquiry into irony.) As important in understanding irony as the ability to detect it in the first place, is the knowledge of which parts of a work are not to be read as irony, “learning where to stop” as one of Booth’s chapter titles has it.

In this chapter Booth gives five handicaps to understanding or detecting irony:
• Ignorance – the irony is presented in a context unfamiliar to a reader, which could be cultural, generational, or any number of milieus that the reader does not share with the author or the intended audience, and with which he is unfamiliar.
• Inability to Pay Attention – Booth’s examples are of readers encountering irony in a format, such as a newspaper article, that normally does not require the kind of attentive reading that would be given to a work of literature.
• Prejudice – the reader does not share or is opposed to an author’s point of view, either the ironic message itself, or its intended “reconstructed” meaning.
• Lack of Practice – either inexperience in reading irony in general or unfamiliarity with generic conventions whose violation may point to irony (this seems to fall equally well under “Ignorance”).
• Emotional Inadequacy – Readers who are “either too ready to emote or too resistant to emotional appeals”.

In the last sections of the book, Booth deals with texts that go beyond “stable irony” into “unstable irony”, where it is impossible to reconstruct an ironic passage into a “correct” statement of an author’s position (the only specific examples here are some passages from The Man Without Qualities, and a Howard Nemerov poem, “Boom!”). Beyond “unstable irony” lies “infinite instability”, ironic works in which there is no “knowing where to stop” because every attempt at reconstruction or negation leads to further irony; Samuel Beckett is the prime example given here.

[Zachary · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was perhaps more admirable than it was interesting, in a sense. Booth displays an incredible, patient eye here as he tries to systematically understand and explore what makes irony work, what makes it recognizable, and the various ways that irony is employed by authors for distinct dramatic effects. It's the systemization that is most incredible to me here, as he really tries to take a step back and trace the various steps that individuals must take in order to understand what is happening in an ostensibly ironic situation. Personally, I don't think I'd have the patience or the attention to detail to be able to break down those processes as intricately as he does. The examples that he uses throughout the book are also a highlight, with a ton of interesting speeches, stories, and poems that really usefully expose and display the problems and difficulties that he identifies with irony. Overall the book is very useful, even if it does spend a lot of time on specific examples, and was as engaging as something so intricate and detailed can be.

[Tisha G. · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a precious piece of critical analysis! The writing is so immersive and even the arduous philosophical lucubrations are conducted with lightheartedness and good humor. I had genuine fun reading it.

[Carolyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wayne C. Booth is always worth the read. I re-read this from time to time, but haven't yet posted it here. Date listed is most recent re-read.

[Kris Polidano · Rating 3 out of 5]

For his writing style -- I'll give Wayne C. a boot.

[Suzan]

Ben çevirdim, o kadar iyi bir çeviri değil.

[John Fitzgerald · Rating 4 out of 5]

Booth always delivers, but I think this falls a bit short of The Rhetoric of Fiction.

[Lukia · Rating 5 out of 5]

drag me, wayne c booth

[Mary Catelli · Rating 4 out of 5]

By the same author as The Rhetoric of Fiction. Probably not as useful as a how-to-write book. Still fascinating.


He starts off with observations about the confident assertions that we will all make -- and agree on -- about ironical readings. Like the opening of Pride And Prejudice. If anyone said it was not ironic, we would all agree that the assertion was simply wrong.

And how do we recognize when a work is ironic -- like the opening of Brave New World, with all its loaded adjectives to point us in the right direction.

And the complexities of what actually an ironical statement means -- Swift's A Modest Proposal says that the landlords surely have best title to the children, having devoured the parents, but he clearly does not mean simply that the landlords don't have best title, which is stupid and obvious and not worth arguing against because no one would say it.

And the complexities of reading passages with irony in them. The opening of Northanger Abbey is ironical, but we will accept without question that there are ten children in Catherine's family, and they are plain. Or, a story by Poe he cites where a stage Irishman is discussing with glee his life since he inherited a baronetcy, and we disbelieve everything -- except that he has inherited a baronetcy, which we believe instantly.

Irony is kind of complex. This is interesting romp through some of the more complex corners.

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

Concerned that the increasingly sprawling figural territory covered by irony will render it a useless term, one of Wayne Booth’s key arguments in his Rhetoric of Irony is this: “[I]t is clear that a spate of uninterpretable [i.e. unstable] ironies has the same effect as providing no experience in irony at all” (227). Booth focuses instead on relatively interpretable, or “stable,” ironies, taking as a given that “to achieve ironic communication is a worthwhile thing in itself” (217, emphasis added) and foregrounding irony’s role as “the key to the tightest bonds of friendship” rather than an unstable gateway to nihilism (14). Booth in fact claims that what many theorists use as examples of unstable irony are quite stable. Samuel Beckett, for instance, demonstrates “an extremely stable commitment to absurdist views” (260), and even those of his critics who revel in the meaningless of his plays paradoxically find meaning in them (259). In short, Booth is suspicious of what are now often grouped as poststructuralist accounts of figures—histories in which irony, as well as metaphor, have “ranged from … minute oratical device[s] … to … imperialistic world conqueror[s]” (177).

[Vadim · Rating 2 out of 5]

Распознание иронии в тексте начинается с того, что у нас формируется уверенность: те или иные слова этом тексте нельзя понимать буквально и требуется прочтение, которое во многом ему противоположно. В книге "Риторика иронии" Уэйн Бут разбирает, как становится возможным понимание иронического подтекста: что для этого делает автор? как дистанцируется от буквально написанного? при помощи каких приемов распознает замысел автора читатель? Успешное перемигивание автора с читателем дадут ему больше, чем прямо выраженная мысль, но не неуспех чаще всего будет стоить дороже.